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God Is a Character

August 9, 2011

James Wood’s Critic at Large essay in the magazine this week on how secularism stands up to religious belief (or fails to do so) opens some speculative doors that seem to open onto the abyss. Before going into free fall myself, I’ll churn my legs, cartoon-style, and try to catch a moment of poise before the descent.

Wood considers a friend’s nocturnal speculations on whether life is “cosmically irrelevant” and his own “moments of terror and incomprehension” to be the sort of thing that makes people turn to religion, and suggests that neither the secularist nor the believer can help:

We are locked into our rival certainties—religiosity on one side, secularism on the other—and to confess to weakness on this order is like a registered Democrat wondering if she is really a Republican, or vice versa.

It seems apt that, in evoking the appeal of religion even to nonbelievers, Wood cites a work of art (in the event, Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse”). Art is the closest thing that atheists have to religion, and it’s the devotion to art that ought to help an atheist temper his disbelief with fascination. I’m an atheist, a secularist, a materialist—and I refer often to God, heaven, and the soul, for the same reason that I talk about Hamlet, Oz, and the Id: namely, they are ideas of vast, epochal, and fecund imaginative power. God is the main character of those very good books that may well be The Greatest Story Ever Told, and to ignore them because of their religious import is as silly as dismissing Homer as a pagan cultist; to dismiss them for the uses made of them is as odd as disdaining Shakespeare because of a dull English class. And the imaginative sympathy that lets a Democrat enter the mind of a Republican or grant a believer insight into the secular experience, or vice versa, is one of the essential elements of art.

The difference between religion and art may be, precisely, secular: art is a story that remains a story, whereas religion uses its story as a basis for law and social organization. Social control or coercion that’s asserted in the name of a super-human power is what makes secularists understandably hostile to religion (or what makes secularists tout court); though, in its claimed superiority to human law, religion may also prove to be a formidably liberating influence, as the Catholic Church was in Solidarity-era Poland (and that’s why the Church is treated by China’s government as a potential threat). But, far from being merely a sign of humility before a higher power, religious law also entails both a form of vanity (e.g., the most powerful being in the universe really does care whether or not I eat a cheeseburger) and a sense of collective, tribal power (derived from belonging to a well-organized and well-defined community that, for instance, doesn’t eat cheeseburgers). The price of answers to what Wood calls “tormented metaphysical questions” is not metaphysical but temporal: it’s the doctrinally and clerically imposed ban on challenging the answers given—on posing them a second time (the individual being like the country that yields to a religious party that wins elections held only once; dissent becomes apostasy). And as for the sublimity of belief, there’s also a sublimity of skepticism—as seen in the cosmic comedy of Philip Roth’s early story “The Conversion of the Jews” (in the collection “Goodbye, Columbus”).

As for the sense of “enchantment” that Wood cites as a recurring theme in religious devotion, art serves the exact same purpose: “a world filled with gods, demons, and magic” is what art offers—while still letting us eat cheeseburgers. (And it also gives us the opposite—a world that, at times, is void of gods, demons, and magic, which is, at times, a great relief.) Atheists who aren’t interested in considering even the stories of the supernatural, in all their alluring and harrowing grandeur, simply impoverish, willfully, their inner lives, their imagination. Yet these aesthetic passions (and their moral implications) aren’t at all a withdrawal from secularism or a hedging of atheism; they’re part of the pursuit of an unblinkered, wide-ranging mental life that the absence of religious dogma makes possible.